Cure
Overview
Ahead of this year's Catalytic Impact Foundation's pitch competition at the Power of X Summit, we checked in with last year's winners LunaJoy, Limax Biosciences, and Flourish Care, who have spent the past year scaling care delivery and advancing their missions.
A year ago, on the stage of Cure’s Power of X Women’s Health Innovation Summit, six early-stage founders made their case for why women’s health innovation deserves more capital. Their presentations were part of the Catalytic Impact Foundation’s (CIF) pitch competition, where startups addressing critical gaps in women’s health can compete for a chance to win $100,000 in capital. LunaJoy took home the grand prize in 2025, but the funding didn’t stop there. In fact, the pitches were so strong that CIF decided to choose two additional startups to support financially.
One year later, the money awarded by the CIF is making an important difference, as last year’s winners move their projects forward and continue furthering women’s health equity.
Additionally, this year's Power of X Summit will see the award return under a new name: CIF Catalytic Innovation Prize. The pitch competition will take place on March 18 in New York City and award $100,000 in capital to an early-stage company addressing critical gaps in women’s health, continuing CIF’s commitment to backing founders in this space.
LunaJoy Scales Pregnancy, Postpartum Mental Health Care
LunaJoy, a health startup that connects pregnant and postpartum patients with mental health support, won first place and earned $100,000 in 2025.
Founded by Sipra Laddha, MD, a reproductive psychologist, LunaJoy used their CIF funding to scale their operations in the United States and create a seamless, high-quality patient experience. This growth helps them achieve their goals of increasing access to important mental health services for the people who need them most.
“When we think about pregnant and postpartum moms, we need to decrease barriers as much as humanly possible to make care accessible for them,” Dr. Laddha told Cure.
LunaJoy also used its Impact Challenge funds to build a mobile-friendly website that patients can use to book or change appointments, contact their clinicians, or manage other healthcare needs with ease, without downloading an app. The company hired an AI engineer in 2025 to continue iterating on their user-friendly digital experience.
“Through developing our AI tools based on quality assurance, we are able to make sure that women are continuing to get highly specialized and evidence-based care around pregnancy and postpartum needs,” Dr. Laddha said.
Patients have historically struggled to access proper psychiatric care during and after pregnancy, but LunaJoy’s CIF capital is helping them change that. Now, they can train more providers to ensure every encounter leads to effective care.
CIF and Cure have also helped LunaJoy tap into important industry networks that move their mission forward.
“The people that I've been able to connect with through those platforms—who've helped either move the business forward or just help me as a CEO think through different opportunities and different challenges—have been amazing,” Dr. Laddha said.
Limax Biosciences Grows Next-Gen Surgical Therapies
Limax Biosciences, a company that created a new form of hydrogels to seal leaks, heal tissues, and deliver targeted therapies in surgical settings, was selected as the runner-up in the 2025 Impact Challenge, receiving its own award of $100,000.
"This funding has been absolutely critical,” said Benjamin Freedman, PhD, of Limax Biosciences. “It provided us the runway to continue advancing our transformative program while we positioned the company for the next phase of growth."
In the past year, Limax Biosciences has built upon this financial foundation to hire a new employee, engage with the FDA for product approval, and apply for Small Business Innovation Research grants, which are federal funds given to startups working on innovative science and technology ideas.
These efforts will help Limax Biosciences continue engineering their next-generation hydrogels, which mimic the sticky, resilient slime of slugs to adhere to wet tissues and stop bleeding. These hydrogels could have many applications, but will be especially impactful in gender health inequities related to childbirth.
“One lead indication area is for addressing bleeding in postpartum hemorrhage in women,” Dr. Freedman said. “We are pushing toward all the necessary pre-clinical testing to get us to human [use] for a number of general bleeding areas for women’s health.”
Flourish Care Expands to More States, Families, and Payers
Flourish was another company that thoroughly impressed the pitch competition judges, and while the startup wasn’t named a runner-up at the pitch competition, a conversation with the CIF started taking shape. This led to CIF’s pledge of a $100,000 award to the company shortly thereafter.
Flourish provides personalized doula support from pregnancy through early parenthood and is using the money to expand their reach.
“We had originally been in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and we were able to launch in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Minnesota with the additional funding,” Melissa Bowley, founder and CEO of Flourish, told Cure.
This growth helped Flourish hire new team members and reach more patients in need.
“In the last year, we supported about 3,000 families, which is incredible,” Bowley said. “These are families who didn’t have access to doula care and that level of support through pregnancy, birth, and postpartum in the past.”
In 2026, Flourish has a goal of reaching 100,000 families. The company is also launching new nationwide partnerships with large medicaid groups, and commercial insurance payers.
“Our goal as a company is to take away barriers to accessing doula and wraparound maternity care,” Bowley says. “At the end of the day, we believe every single family across the country deserves doula care as a standard benefit, and everyone deserves a safe and equitable birth.”
